The anime Dan Da Dan has a funny and endearing first episode where two awkward high school students dare each other to test each other's paranormal/alien beliefs. And what do you know? Both find stuff! But then it gets into the same terrible Japanese clichés of monster of the week and new nakamas and high school dramas.

   The start music is fun, too, which probably hits hard when you first watch the series, but then, together with the content, it fades into the background.

   But the first episode is worth it.

  What do you remember from the Terminator movies? It's the Skynet killer robot, obviously, the people who seem to always be related somehow, and a hero that needs saving for the sake of their work in the future, but running for their lives in the present. In Terminator Zero you get all of these, to the point that they feel a little overdone. But the animation is good and the story is interesting, adding some logical elements that I've only seen in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which I liked a lot and wanted more of. I loved that they set the action in a clearly different timeline than our own and also tried to make it clear the ridiculous cycle of trying to fix the past from the future.

  Unfortunately, they've decided to add children to the mix. And I mean children that need a nanny, not 24 year old Claire Danes. Most of the time it's the children and their very Japanese emotions filling the screen, while their father, a mysterious tech mogul, keeps saying cryptic things almost until the end of the movie for no good reason. The Terminator is thankfully not in the shape of Arnie and the human fighter from the future is a woman. It also is set in Japan. The series ends with a promise rather than with closure, although I doubt they will make a second season.

  It's eight episodes of 20 minutes each, but I think the story was a little too simple for 160 minutes and it could have easily been a more concise two hour animation film. What's the difference, really, between a series you release all at once and a feature film anyway?

  While I applaud stories said in animation - readers of this blog may already know that I believe that's how you do and say brave things today, especially in sci-fi and horror - being a Terminator story meant it was locked in some preestablished framework and couldn't be too creative. Just consider taking some pages out of Screamers, for example, and you understand what I mean. I would watch seasons and seasons of Terminator anime than hope for something decent in live action anymore. The thing is that they already are very far advanced in special effects, but those also cost a lot of money, meaning that you either underdeliver on viewer expectations or have to make a whole bunch of money to break even. Animation is not like that and it's also a lot more flexible.

  All in all I liked the show and I recommend it, but don't expect too much.

  Having seen the French animation film Mars Express, a combination of Asimov's robot stories and Blade Runner, which I enjoyed very much, I tried to find something else written or directed by the same people and so I found Lastman, an animation series with two seasons so far and a third to be released sometimes in the next years. And I loved it!

  Imagine the emotional drive and mystical mystery of Fullmetal Alchemist, but combined with the satirical view on society and monster of the week feel of Jojo's Bizarre Adventures and you get Lastman, only with the irreverent French touch enhancing the experience. Yet, while those shows were quite content to keep the same feel and story throughout their run, Lastman's plot evolves, the characters change, time passes in a meaningful way.

  The moment the second season, quite different from the first and perhaps even better, ended, I immediately went to read the comics. Used to the Japanese manga, I expected to find the comics being the exact same story and drawn characters as in the series, with all I would have to do would be to find where the anime ended and continue the story. Yet, as soon as I found them, the Lastman comics were very different from the anime! At least at first glance, maybe there will be some overlap in the middle or something, but I was surprised - pleasantly so - because now I have an entire new story with new characters to enjoy.

  So the story is about a lone boxer who stumbles upon a mystical mystery and has to take care of an orphaned girl, while supernatural monsters are hunting them down. There are also some fight tournaments, criminal city kingpins, magical drugs and a decadent and hypocritical society. A lot of characters, all of them having their own motivations, growth and occasional foray into the other side (villainous allies and heroic fuckups). And there is a lot of profanity, violence, humor and satire.

  Bottom line: I absolutely loved the series. Was one of the better highlights of my life in the last months.

  P.S. I am sure the idea of a powerful fighter protecting a girl named Siri from otherworldly magical monsters is just as new to you as it is to me.

  On May 8th 1989 the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Q Who?" was released. Not only did it feature Jon de Lancie's delicious interpretation of the being Q, but it introduced for the first time the Borg. Now, the concept of the Borg is not that original: a cybernetic race bent on absorbing everything useful and destroying any enemy or obstacle in their path. They were contrasting the liberal individualism of the United Federation of Planets with a hive mind that connected all Borg to the point where they had no identity. At the time their purpose in the series was to inspire terror: they cared not for damage, they felt no fear or pain, had no interest in negotiation or communication and they were unstoppable in their goal of assimilating the Enterprise. And they were terrifying!

  Then they were brought again for the last episode of season 3 and the continuation in the first episode of season 4. That cliffhanger! The episodes had the title "The Best of Both Worlds". Keep that in mind, because I think it hints at the conundrum the Borg represent. 

  I fell in love with the concept of the Borg. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing they became. They exposed the mindless assumptions that most people take for granted because they were drilled into them by parents and the education system from the earliest age. It made me think about my own identity, reflect on the future and direction of humanity and, in the end, forced me to ask the question "Are the Borg really bad?".

  On a very basic social organization level, it seemed like the Borg were the ultimate tyrannical communists, denying the option of individual thought and forcing everyone to work for the collective. But going a bit further with it, one realized that they stood at the intersection of pure communism and pure democracy. There was no actual tyrant forcing people to act against their will, instead there were part of a mind in which all people were represented, to the point where individuality became meaningless at best and detrimental to the whole at worst. The ultimate tyranny was that of the majority, perhaps.

  On a moral level, the forceful absorption of alien races and the destruction of their cultures was abhorrent, but in the Borg philosophy it was liberating people from the burden of individuality, improving the collective, eliminating potential threats and possibly offering each assimilated individual a form of immortality. Many cultures on Earth, including the United States, proceeded on forcing their philosophy on the world in the name of liberty and better lives. Can you imagine a Borg collective that would have absorbed some parts of alien cultures, not destroying the rest, but just slowly infiltrating, using promises of a better life? How ironic would that have been? Give us your tired, your poor, your sick, your dying, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore and will make them Borg and give them new life.

  On a technological level the Borg were supreme. If it weren't for the pesky need to have our heroes prevail, humanity would have stood no chance whatsoever. It was one of the first mainstream TV depictions of cosmic horror, the feeling that comes with the realization the universe is indifferent to your existence and your maximum possible contribution completely insignificant, and I was loving it! But isn't it the same thing with some advanced nations on Earth, acting all mighty and moral while exploiting other nations while keeping them in abject poverty?

  On a philosophical level the Borg were awesome. They adapted to threats, turned adversity into strength, knowledge into power, all the while yearning and actively pursuing the improvement of their species. A fascist vibe, for sure, but isn't fascism so attractive to some people that it brings the hardest fanaticism to the surface? Isn't that the logic of every nation at war? Us against them?

  Were the Borg the ultimate baddies or were they the cruelest satire of our own civilization? It was becoming apparent that in order to make them feel more like enemies and less than mirrors of ourselves the writers of the show were piling up all kind of incongruous defects on the species. The cybernetic appendages were hideous, looked painful and corrupting the beauty of the flesh. Their actions veered from utilitarian to cruel. The Borg drones acted like mindless clumsy robots, uncaringly wasting life after life just to adapt to simple technologies like phaser fire.

  When Seven of Nine was introduced in Voyager, there were some really intriguing explorations of the Borg ethos. After being "liberated" from the collective, Janeway hypocritically offered her the choice to return to being a Borg, and Seven wanted back. Surprised, Janeway revealed that she had no intention whatsoever to honor her promise or the wishes of Seven. Resistance was futile.

  Seven was proud to be Borg: fearless, efficient, ready to adapt to anything and sacrifice everything for her group. If all Borg felt the same, then they were a species of stoic heroes, something that we humans have always honored and aspired to. The irony of freeing someone from a life of selfless service.

  Most other depictions of the Borg in the Star Trek universe were designed to lazily use the template of the "bad guy" in situations were the Borg were either not needed or would have easily won if not nerfed by silly plot holes, but there were a few glimpses of what the Borg could have really been.

  It was obvious that no one was interested in keeping the Borg as a believable threat. The "Borg queen" was introduced to make all attractive qualities of the collective simple consequences of an arbitrary individual, a responsible guilty party and a single point of failure to the entire Borg species. When writers did that, it was clear they didn't understand what the Borg were about, were not interested in exploring them further as mirrors of ourselves and were ready to destroy them with the silly trope of "find the brain, blow it up", the cesspool that all lazy sci-fi ends up in.

  My twelve year old me was full of questions and fantastical ideas after meeting the Borg. I was imagining a parallel universe where Star Trek was all about the Federation trying to hold back the Borg. When Star Trek: Deep Space 9 came about and then the Dominion War, I decried that they could have done that with the Borg instead, exploring and continuously redefining the ideals of humanity on the background of possible assimilation. I still dream of such a franchise. It seems that we always start to do it, but chicken out when it matters most: Star Trek and the Borg, Starship Troopers and the bugs, Stargate and the Goa'uld, Starcraft and the Zerg. We seem incapable of sustaining a prolonged conflict against a species that denies our choice of identity, whether in real life or in fantasy. Wouldn't that be most apropos of modern times?

  There is a psychological theory that tries to categorize behavior and personality into three: the Child, the Parent and the Adult. I am not really a specialist (I feel that the word "psychological" is an oxymoron), but in short you get the Child, who feels things and acts on impulse and pleasure and is creative, the Parent, who respects and enforces rituals that hold society together and free individuals from trivial decisions, and the Adult, who tries to do the best to mediate between the other two states by striving towards an objective view of reality.

  The roots of Star Trek, from this point of view, are that of an Adult that sometimes leans towards Parent. The show examines our current beliefs by creating fictional situations where they are put to the test. Characters or even entire societies assume archetypal roles, child-like, parent-like, while the role of the heroic Federation crew is to mediate some sort of understanding between them. As any good sci-fi, it is meant to make people think for themselves.

  No other show makes this mission clearer than Star Trek Discovery, which failed miserably to be Star Trek because it pushed its agenda on the viewer, rather than letting them think for themselves and make their own choice. Star Trek has touched so many controversial subjects, usually without taking things too far, but occasionally doing a brilliant job to inspire introspection.

  For example the Borg, which were always "evil" in their attempt to circumvent individuality and absorb everything and everybody in their megaorganism. Yet, with characters such as Hugh and Seven of Nine, grey areas were explored, culminating, I believe, with the conflict between Seven and Janeway, when her individuality is returned to her, but then her choices to return to the Collective are rejected. I still believe that they could have done a deeper job here, but times being what they were and the show being American, they got pretty far as it is. Personally, I would make an entire show about humans and a Borg-like species only.

  Frustrated by rules and rituals (heh!), Seth McFarlane, a huge Star Trek fan, decided to stop begging people to let him do a Star Trek show and created his own, borrowing what he could from the original show and improving or changing things to escape the confines of copyright. The Orville was born, a show that is a must see for any Star Trek fan. And I have to admit that when I decided to write this post, I was planning to talk about the differences between shows such as Star Trek Next Generation (and DS9 and especially Voyager), which leans a little too much toward the Parent role, and The Orville, which does a pretty good job being an Adult. But then I've changed my mind.

  The reason why I've changed my mind is the story of Topa. If you have not watched The Orville yet, please do so because I am going to spoil it for you.

  OK, so Topa is the female child of a two males Moclan couple in a society that considers females a genetic aberration. When a female infant is born, they immediately change their sex to male and never tell the children they were born different. How apropos this subject is, a society of homosexual males forcefully trans-forming any female baby, analyzed from our current socio-political point of view. And they did a fantastic job... at the beginning.

  You see, the first part of the story is about the disagreement between one parent and the other about if they should obey the mandated custom of their home planet, even if they are on a Federation (sorry, Union) ship. You can guess which part the crew was leaning toward, yet they had to accept the decision of the people in the culture that child was born... which was to proceed with the transformation. A disappointment for our American minded future union of planets, but what an episode finale! And before that, the revelation that the most revered poet of the Moclan culture is actually a female living in secrecy and willing to reveal herself to "fight for the cause".

  The second part is when the femaleness of Topa surfaces and makes her feel she lives in the wrong body. Again a lot of politics and scandal and opinions back and forth. This time, the episode is less ambiguous and I think the writers were actually afraid to do it any other way. Or they were lazy. Because at the end they skirt the law and the agreements between species and they reveal to Topa that she was born a female and immediately revert her to a female state in the same episode. A lot of effort went into making the supportive parent look good and the reticent parent look bad.

  Finally (maybe) the episode I saw today, where the female poet, now leader of a colony of all female Moclans that are protected from their homeworld's wrath by a Union agreement, tries to coopt Topa to be part of the "resistance" and she, hero-pressured, accepts, then almost loses her life at the hands of the evil all male Moclan military. I applauded the way it exposed the hypocrisy of the female leader, using a child to further her agenda and also endangering the entire colony that she was responsible for. However, again I felt like the conflict was resolved too quickly and too swiftly towards what we would accept as agreeable: Topa escapes with her life, the entire Union rejects the Moclan way of life and even the conservative parent makes a comeback complete with a full reversal of his opinions. How is the Union going to keep itself together if they can't accept the local idiosyncrasies of member states?

  And here is where the Parent, Adult, Child analysis feels appropriate. Topa, the child who wants to do what she feels is right and damn the consequences, Klyden the parent who won't renounce his custom and beliefs regardless of who that hurts and Bortus, the other parent - with an entire interstellar Union to support him, who has to find an adult way forward in which harm is minimized.

  I feel like the first episode about Topa lifted Orville above Star Trek shows. I know, blasphemy! How can I discount the eternal greatness of Star Trek? Well, because I compare the whole thing with the Seven of Nine storyline, where the show quickly dismissed her desire to return to the Collective as childish and went full Parent Janeway on her, even working towards a Mother/Daughter dynamic between them to justify it all. The Orville episode looked at individual opinions, cultural clashes, diplomatic discourse, the feelings of everyone involved and made the brave choice to not give the audience what it hoped for. Thus, making them think about the whole thing. Now with the other two episodes, I feel like the writers succumbed to societal pressure to resolve the conflict the only way the viewers would accept. And pronto! Before they #metoo McFarlane! Or maybe that's just stupid and childish, I don't know. I just liked the first episode so much compared with the "classical" other two.

  I think the PAC (Parent-Adult-Child) model is pretty useful in dissecting these Star Trek-like situations. I find it inspiring that the Adult, which is something people supposedly should strive to achieve psychologically, cannot exist in a vacuum. Without Adults and Children, it has no direction, it's like an AI system without a value function, while the two other roles generate this direction from feeling and instinct (genetics) and experience and tradition (culture). Whenever the crew encounter an alien species and enter the inevitable conflict, they have to not only solve the problem, but also do it in a way that is objectively and morally better, while also catering to their often strong feelings about a subject. Fascinating!

  We must be aware of the attraction we people have for strong authoritative figures that "know what's best", just as we must be aware of how easy solutions that feel good in the moment may have disastrous consequences further down the line. In some way, accepting everything from Picard-like people is almost as dangerous as acting like Q all the time.

  Haven't you ever wondered what a show like Star Trek would be like if situations were actually dangerous, where tech solutions would not solve everything in minutes and the alternatives are run, negotiate, intimidate or attack? When meeting some backwater one planet civilization that sentences your people to death for stamping on a flower, instead of spending one hour to save them using some loophole in the local law system to just arm photon torpedoes and say "Choose a city. Any city. Preferably one that you won't need anymore." Or if phasers would be set on "cut through stone" whenever firing at an alien lunging towards the crew? Or using any and all technology one finds to increase the tactical advantages of your ship and navy?

  But that's the whole point! Star Trek is not about levelling up, is about finding yourself with just shitty options and still choosing the one that is most principled and logical for everyone involved. About examining one's preconceptions and reaching not a conclusion, but a point of decision where the viewer can spend some time and think. It's about good writing! Compare that with Kirk on a motorcycle and you realize what the roots of Star Trek are all about.

  I wanted to write a post about how Star Trek treats too many situations as a Parent, probably because it was created by people in the 60s and 70s, and is sometimes too eager to put characters in their place because family (yeah, The Fast and the Furious doesn't have a monopoly on that) and how The Orville is going above that. Then I realize that they are actually doing the same thing, most of the time, with Orville just freshening things up and having a little bit more courage when writing their stories. And I love it! 

  Happy Trekking!

  First of all, neither am I a philosopher nor have I read Nietzsche. The philosophical aspects that I am discussing are how a layman would interpret them. In this post I am going to discuss anime from the Baki Hanma and JoJo's Bizarre Adventures universes with a nod to Andromeda's race of genetically modified humans called Nietzscheans and also other media portrayals of similar concepts.

  Watching episodes from Baki or JoJo anime I got a weird feeling. Both series, while having completely different plots, focus on humans with superior abilities fighting each other. Nothing new here: both American and Japanese cultures are inundated with this cliché. Yet these shows are strangely humanistic in nature. The characters have impossible strong muscles, dress in their own special way and are proudly dedicated to particular philosophies that define their path in life. Compared to other people, they are intimidating, entirely dominating, and they are so strong that they defy the laws of medicine and even physics. They use their power in tactical and strategic ways, they hone their skills, they outthink their adversaries and use whatever the environment gives them in order to win. And this in order to gain power only over themselves.

  In so many ways, they reminded me of the Nietzscheans, from Gene Roddenberry's TV series Andromeda (before the show went to shit, so first season only). They also reveled in their physical, mental and knowledge prowess. Violence, to them, was justified as a way to eliminate weakness. The characters in the two anime shows are the same: they risk their health, their lives, in order to try themselves to the limit. As a result, they cannot exist in human society. People can't abide such obvious difference, when these guys are stronger than guns, impossible to detain through cuffs, chains, walls or cages and at any time they can just destroy a normal human being with little to no effort. It is this part that actually got me thinking and writing the blog post.

  Usually in media, people who care only about their own betterment to the point they eschew social norms are portrayed as villains. Human values are represented as communal values: caring about others, respecting their way to live, abiding social constraints and obeying laws, forming bonds and families, then dedicating effort to maintain and preserve them. The hero will defend, not attack, will arrest, not destroy, will consider, not dismiss, will protect, not invade. In fact, a hero is a social construct and can only exist as society's protector.

  In regular situations, the ones that are considered normal in society, heroes are not needed. Performance is not needed. There are some boundaries in which one is allowed to strive for better output, but only as cogs in a social mechanism that needs them to perform within expected ranges. Only when things go awry, from the breaking of a component (be it a tool, a flow or a person) to some huge disaster, some people "step up" and take over the load. Those are heroes. And here is the dilemma, because someone who has not made the effort of being better than expected of them will not be able to step up, while someone who does make the effort is inevitably vilified during "peace times".

  This reminds me of Rambo, in the first movie and not the ridiculous propaganda sequels. Here is a man who, through circumstances that needed to be tragic and out of his control so as to enhance his heroic status, reached a level above his peers, at least in one particular domain: fighting and killing. He was perfect as a soldier, but as he returns home he has difficulties integrating himself back into society. It takes only a small town sheriff bullying to bring the beast to surface. The old adage still stands: the best heroes are all dead.

  Going back to the animes, I found myself in conflict. Here is the usual portrayal of society, a safe place for everybody to live in, defining what human life is and should be like, but functioning as a soulless mechanism. And here is the usual portrayal of the self absorbed villain, a monstruous being of immense power who threatens the existence of all, but functioning as a proud individual constantly bettering themselves. I feel like the latter option is more humanistic, therefore truly being human is in antithesis to human society.

  Can there be a balance between the two? Could we actually imagine a benign Nietzschean-like society? One that would truly embrace diversity, specialization and performance while despising mediocrity and also not eating itself from within? I find it hard, if not impossible. Still, I can't but feel a sort of admiration for these larger than life characters and their dedication to a random thing than then defines them for ever.

  What do you think?

There is a war going on for the direction of Star Trek. It doesn't matter where you stand on it, if you want to make it a political platform, rather than a moral one, or if you want to make it flashier, more explody, or episodic and topical. What matters is that during 56 years, the show was always about mending things, solving conflict, bringing people together. The very fight for a single direction in which to trek is not very Star Trek.

I was watching the pilot for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, by appearance an attempt to bridge the gap between the numerous trekkie factions, and it was never more clear to me that we need to heal this silly feud. In the episode, two warring factions are about to destroy their world in a planetary conflict, but the captain of the Federation ship comes over and shows them how we were and where that got us. The scene was perfect for exemplifying this conflict between the cerebral and the emotional, between the money and the principle, between the political and the rational. Because on one side it said: if we think a little bit further before we act, if we consider the consequences of what we do, we might change our path for a better outcome. Yet on the other it said: we have the answers to everything and if we arrogantly intervene and give a speech backed up by technology, power and a single limited perspective we can solve what you couldn't in centuries of strife.

It's the American hubris and superiority complex wrapping a hint of principled good intentions. And this was always Star Trek, always on the verge of something, part arrogance and part compassion, science directed by human nature at its best, exploration of the possible. And sure, I can personally spout bile and vinegar at Star Trek: Discovery for being a woke piece of crap that destroys decades of careful threading on the edge of showing off and trying to make people think while entertaining them, I can complain about Star Trek movies that wantonly create different timelines in which they can destroy planets and ships and use lens flares and motorcycles and big explosions that mean nothing or cry at the desecration of beloved characters by Star Trek: Picard, but in the end we must reach a dialog in the Star Trek universe, a balance not a consensus.

Star Trek is not about canon, it's not a religion, it is an exploration of the human. It's big enough to contain multitudes. They don't have to agree. Yes, it's a mark of incompetence and being an asshole when you decide to create Star Trek stories that disrespect or even contradict existing ones, but Star Trek can take it. The Star Trek war must be "resolved" by accepting and allowing all of these expansions of the initial concept. Star Wars used an epic introductory text referencing an entire galaxy, then only to restrict itself to the same context, the same characters, somehow always being related to each other. Trek can do better. Just think of every incarnation of Star Trek - be it canon or not, official or fan made, made by Bad Robot or by someone who understands Gene Roddenberry's vision - as a member of a Federation of Stories. Different, but united in the goal of bringing peace and knowledge to the universe.

As I see it, Star Trek is but a seed of what it could be, what is should be. When Star Trek: Next Generation - in my irrelevant opinion the best of them all - appeared, it had a different feel from original Star Trek, it had different characters, it was set in a different time. It built on the old and explored more. Let's do that! Let's explore it all! Just don't restrict it to something small and petty.

  I am watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show that I have loved since I was a child and was watching obsessively again and again at that time. Yet as I grew older (and hopefully wiser) and with full knowledge of TV and movie culture since then, I see many new things in this show that I was unable at the time of my youth.

  Next Generation is, on the surface, a story about a wonderful future in which humanity has somehow distilled its best qualities and created a post-scarcity utopia that anyone can enjoy and in which everybody can thrive. People are intelligent, educated, passionate, considerate, moral, loyal and dutiful. They don't even have money anymore!  In a show made in 1987, computers were there just to do the bidding of humans, with no creativity or decision power. Security was just a matter of choosing a good password any anyone could access almost everything given a few minutes.

   However this was not unintentional. The vision of the show was focused on "humanity at its best" and so it could never be outmatched by algorithms, machines or cold calculation. And the most beautiful thing of all is Starfleet, an organization dedicated to knowledge and exploration, diplomacy and discovery, where everyone who is insanely qualified can find their place amongst the stars, happy to serve their duty in a heavily structured navy that is at the same time diverse, inclusive, quaint and strict.

  It surely inspired me when I was a child, but now I start seeing things that I couldn't then. The judgement of anyone who is different while expressing views of total tolerance, for example. And I am not talking about species that were particularly designed to be repugnant or immoral, like the Ferengi, but about people. Barclay, for example, a brilliant engineer that can't find the confidence to assert himself is ridiculed for his addiction to the holodeck, called Broccoli behind his back, almost transferred because he is not expressing himself as expected and punctual enough, yet embraced when he saves the day. At that time it felt like an honest mistake that the crew wished to resolve and in the end did. But what if he didn't save the day? In another episode, Riker refuses yet another promotion to captain and an admiral asserts his career will suffer, as other young and brilliant people aim higher than him, which makes him seem a risk avoider. And in yet another episode Picard goes back in time to behave more rationally in his youth, only to find himself in the present relegated to a role of lieutenant that is not taken seriously when asking for advancement because he had always chosen the safe path.

  All this went over my head when I was young, but now it sounds a lot just like the most toxic of corporate cultures. You either fit in and play happy or you are pushed out to a life that no one even mentions. You can tend plants in your garden for the rest of your life, because if you didn't fall in line with the office rulebook, you won't be working there. That doesn't sound like a utopia for me, but a dystopia, a world ruled by churches that expect, with kindness, that you obey the rules exactly, both in your work life and your personal one, move in a certain way, behave in a certain way, talk in a certain way and navigate topics of conversation carefully. In fact, many a time in Star Trek, the line between work and personal life was explicitly rejected. In one episode Deanna Troi shouts to her mother that the crew of the Enterprise is her family and there lies her life. In many others Picard refuses to go on vacation and even there he is reading heavy stuff that will help him at his work.

  The principles spouted by the actors in the show are also routinely broken by actions motivated with sophistry and dramatism. But not just anyone can break those principles. One of the main cast can do it, and always under the benevolent yet strict oversight of the captain. And in case you want to "play the game" and "fake it till you make it" there is always counselor Troi to invade your privacy and broadcast you real emotions to the captain.

  And I admit that I am a corporate guy, enjoying the relative safety and monetary comfort by sacrificing some of my principles and remaining relevant to my level of employment. The truth is that the same environment can be a blessing for some and a nightmare for others. Yet the problem is not the rules themselves, but how static and rigid they are. If one can either choose one way to behave or the other, with no overlap and a large gap between the two, there is little chance for people from a group to move to the other. Without that mobility things stagnate and die and that is exactly my own experience in real life corporations.

  I am not trying to criticize The Next Generation here. It was an amazing show that churned 25 episodes of good storytelling and decent acting per year for seven years in a row and which generated two spinoffs: DS9 and Voyager. Compare this with today's Star Trek: seasons of 13 episodes with three times the budget per episode (adjusted for inflation) and a linear storyline that is neither original nor well thought. What I am trying to say is that under the veneer of a beautiful bright future, one that Gene Roddenberry imagined with the best of intentions, the details belie the influence of the real world and of how people really function. It's a wonderful example of how the same concepts and the same words look great at one time and less so after you experience them.

  Bottom line: I think Gene's vision was great and the future imagined by him puts the present to shame, yet I am sure I would have had a very hard time adapting to life on the Enterprise. Perhaps I would have been the guy at the teleporter station, who obviously has no reason to do anything there unless when orbiting or approaching another ship, doing his job in a place with no windows or chairs and that somehow everyone knows by name. Or the cadet who always finds ways of optimizing things, but can't navigate the complicated rules of political correctness or the chain of command when wanting to express them. Or Barclay. Probably Barclay.

Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari is one of those isekai animes where a normal Japanese boy is summoned in a magical realm to fight monsters. Once there, he realizes that the world and his character work exactly as in a fantasy video game, complete with items with upgradeable stats, waves of monsters and revealing female armor. He is summoned there with three other heroes, also from Japan, only from alternate universes, each of the heroes having their own magical item that defines their style. His item is a shield and immediately he notices that he is treated differently, with all honors given to the other three and only disgust for him. Long story short, he is forced to hone his skills through his will and efforts alone, while the others, spoiled by their environment, make no effort and therefore level up less.

I liked this anime and I will continue to watch it, although it's a bit ridiculous. I've read the manga as well, which is also new, and there are slight differences in the sense that the anime is a little more serious. If you want a mindless game like experience in anime form, go for it. Here is a trailer:

Violet Evergarden is set in a steampunk universe in which technology, other than metal prosthetics, is at the 19th century level, and the main character is a girl that was used as an elite child soldier in a terrible war who now has to find a purpose in a civilian life. She takes on the job of a "auto memory doll", a person who needs to put into words the feelings of others. That's a bit of a stretch, because she doesn't know how to feel herself... it's like me taking on a job in psychology or artistic design so as to learn a new skill. Certainly great for me, but kind of sucks for my employer!

Anyway, the animation is really well done and the acting is top notch. The story itself is beautiful, even if at times inconsistent. After watching the 14 episodes of the first season, I was itching for more, only to hear from a colleague that the studio responsible for the animation, Kyoto Animation, was destroyed in a terrible arson attack. That doesn't bode well for a sequel, yet a spin-off film had already been announced, so who knows?

Bottom line: it's not for everyone. PTSD romance, I would call it. But it nicely animated and I liked the story. I felt that the characters were a bit off, but not annoyingly so. Here is a trailer, in English:

I was browsing the selection of films on HBO Go and I have to say, for someone who is used to the options available on torrent sites, the films and series that are available there are both incredibly diverse and woefully inadequate. But if there is something that I am grateful for with that particular network, it is Billy Crystal's autobiographical play. It's called 700 Sundays and it is everything I have come to love about actor biographies... in video format. Within two hours of wonderful acting and playwriting, Billy finds the way to tell the story of his childhood, adolescence and adulthood without once getting into the things we actually know him for: acting, comedy, Hollywood. It's so wonderfully personal that is feels a bit too intimate, like someone describing in detail their love life.

Boy, does this guy love. There is this cliche about comedians that are essentially depressed and fight it, for a while, with humor, until their inevitable depression and subsequent suicide. Billy Crystal is nothing like that! He owns every scene, he fights for his audience and he is proud of his legacy. He is blessed, even while he mourns the death of his parents, because while they were alive, they loved him with all their strength and while he is alive, love is what defines him.

Bottom line: it is two hours of wonder. Whether you watch it on HBO Go or download it from somewhere, it is a must, it is absolutely necessary that you watch what a 67 year old master of storytelling and comedy will make out of his life story. I like biographies and this it one of the best, created in the medium Crystal feels most at home: stand up comedy.

I was half expecting the show to be freely available on YouTube or something similar, but in this day and age, quality is always behind some paywall. I leave you with a trailer to the show and I urge you to see it:

[youtube:S2BhJg7nGjA]

Paranoia Agent (or Delusion Agent, maybe) is an anime by famous anime director Satoshi Kon, unfortunately killed by cancer in 2010. His work is always more than it seems, focusing on the inner worlds of people and how they all perceive things differently.

The anime is only 13 episodes and starts with a simple case of violent assault on the street and then becomes stranger and stranger until it is not clear which is real and which is in someone's head. It critiques the repressive Japanese society and human nature in general, it goes from police procedural to slapstick comedy, from horror to psychological drama. The ending is, as they say, a mystery that doesn't stay solved for long. I quite liked the anime and I recommend it highly. It is rarer and rarer to find Japanese anime which is not derivative or simply idiotic.

Well, it ended a while ago, but I've just now got around to watching the last episodes from the sixth and last season of The Americans. It was a very interesting concept, following around two Russian spies that pretend to be a normal two kid and a picket fence couple while doing missions for the KGB on American soil. Luckily, it was set during the height of the Cold War, not now, so none of that fake news Twitter bull.

It was well played, too: Mathew Rhys and Noah Emmerich are both great as the Russian male agent and the unknowing FBI agent who moves right next door on one of faith's whims. However, it was Keri Russell who shone throughout the sometimes uneven run of the show. I mean, people knew her from Felicity, where she was a cute cheerful university student, but in this show she is seductive when she needs to get someone's trust, ruthless and unstoppable when she needs someone dead, unwaveringly loyal to her home country and hard as a rock underneath her ever changing appearance and disguises.

You can't run a show for six seasons and not evolve your characters (well, a lot of shitty shows do that), but The Americans excels in making the main characters have to face not only the consequences of their missions, but also the consequences of normal people living their lives. If Nadiejda the spy grows throughout the show, so must Elizabeth the wife and mother. I especially admired the twists and turns of Philip's moral qualms and how he wanted to reconcile his different personas while Elizabeth chose splintering apart as her way to cope.

Now, not all is well with this show. There were seasons when nothing interesting was actually happening. Henry's character never evolved away from a stupid kid that asks no questions and is missing from the series for entire seasons, while his sister not only was figuring it out, but was also recruited as a "second generation" agent. Admittedly, Holly Taylor was annoying as hell in that role, but she didn't write her character's script. I also suspect that people got turned away from the show by the brilliant portrayal of a loyal Russian agent by Keri Russell. She was too hard, too Russian, too human for comfort. I can only admire both her and the show developers for going all the way in with her character.

All in all, I have mostly good things to say about the show and if you have not watched it, I highly recommend it. It seems to me that this show has enough followers to warrant a full feature film production in which the actors could shine in a one-off mission spy movie. I am also curious on what Keri Russell will do other than a rumored Star Wars appearance that I believe is a poor choice for someone who shone so brightly in a real role.

About the ending... it actually ends. It's not one of those shows that get cancelled without any preparation, leaving everything in limbo. However it is also one of those endings that is generic enough for them to have planned it seasons ago. We see some of the consequences spell out, but there is not enough time to really understand where it all leads to. It was nice to see the reactions of the characters to the sudden end, but it was certainly not enough to make a statement about the real outcome of their actions.

Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos is the film that banks on the hunger of Alchemists all over the world after the Brotherhood series ended. It is not a sequel, just a full feature film happening sometime around the 21st episode of the series. The story is complicated: three nations in turmoils, alchemy of all sorts, chimeras and in the middle of it all: Ed and Al, fighting for what is right.

I liked the story, it hit a lot of sour points of the present, with large nations literally shitting on smaller ones, while they can only maintain their dignity by hanging on old myths that give them moral rights over some God forsaken territory. What I didn't particularly enjoy were the characters and the details of the plot. There were many holes and, in all, no sympathetic characters. The few promising ones were only barely sketched, while the main ones were kind of dull. The animation also felt lazy. If this was supposed to be a send off for the characters, it exceeded its purpose, as now I am considering if I would have even enjoyed a series made in such a lazy way.

So, bottom line, part cash grab, part great concept. A promising film that reminded me of the series I loved so much a decade ago, but failed to rekindle the hunger I felt when the series ended. Goodbye, Elric brothers!

I've watched several lackluster recent Japanese animes from Netflix and I was feeling bored and disappointed with the clichés spouted by almost every character, most of them as cardboard as they can be. So when I started with Devilman Crybaby, a very original show both from the standpoint of the manga it adapts and the animation style, I was hoping for not being bored. And I wasn't. The show is fast, jumping from scene to scene and asking the viewer to extrapolate what happened in between. The characters are complex and seldom critical of one aspect or another of society, or representing such negative treats. Violence and sex are everywhere, although they are often depicted as kinds of vices and impulses that people have to fight against. The animation style is weirdly psychedelic. So did I like it? Not really.

Even from the beginning I was off put by the animation style. It's paradoxically both artistic and very simple. It made me think of Aeon Flux (the MTV animated series), which had several other things in common with this, as well. But I didn't let it bother me and I continued watching. As I said before, the characters are complex and the story is meandering around the peculiarities of each of them, which made it interesting. However, the plot was full of holes! Things that were "revealed" later on were evident from the beginning, people acted in weird ways that were eroding the suspension of disbelief. There were fights, but simplistic in nature and more inline with the symbolism that the author was so hard on. There were substories, but kept to a bare minimum. Do you see a pattern already?

Yes, in its entirety, things that were not important to the philosophical message that the anime wanted to make were abstracted, simplified or removed altogether. It is hard to enjoy any of it after you've got the memo. Even worse, perhaps because of its heavy (handed) symbolism, all the articles and reviews online praise it as a masterpiece. I said it before and I will say it again: just because it is not the usual crap it doesn't mean it's good. There are so many sorts of crap. You read two or three of them, discussing "what they meant", and you realize they are as full of shit as the makers of the anime. If you need to explain what you meant, the joke wasn't very good!

To be less of a dick about it, the show has many redeeming qualities, that is why I can't discuss too much the particulars without spoiling it, and you might want to watch it. However, to me, those qualities were wasted in the pseudo spiritual and moral bullshit that suffused the show. One alleviating circumstance is the source material, written in the 70s, which I have not read, so I can't really compare, but it was the 70s. Weird and wonderful stuff came from back then. This is mostly just weird. And I really hated the title.

Here is the trailer:

[youtube:ww06yGPM7Kc]